Forest service safety manual

Data Management Committee. Data Standards and Terminology Board. Geospatial Subcommittee. National Fire Equipment System Subcommittee. Position Task Books. Wildland firefighter Fatalities in the United States: , pms Smoke Committee. Technical Smoke Topics Subcommittee. Interagency Aerial Supervision Subcommittee. Interagency Airspace Subcommittee. Training Delivery Committee.

Ground Ignition Subcommittee. Communication Education and Prevention Committee. Hazard Tree and Tree Felling Subcommittee. Resource Advisor Subcommittee. Resource Advisor's Guide for Wildland Fire, pms Six Minutes For Safety. Smoke and Roadway Safety Guide.

The New Generation Fire Shelter. The New Generation Fire Shelter, nfes, pms Unit Identifier Board. Water Handling Equipment Guide. Humbolt, Del Norte. Fortuna, CA Lassen, Modoc, Plumas.

Susanville CA. Madera, Mariposa, Merced. Mariposa, CA Highway Willits, CA Nevada, Yuba, Placer, Sutter, Sierra. Grass Valley, CA San Benito-Monterey.

San Benito, Monterey. King City, CA San Bernardino. Sierra Way. San Bernardino, CA San Diego. San Diego, Imperial. El Cajon, CA San Luis Obispo.

Santa Rosa St. San Luis Obispo, Ca San Mateo-Santa Cruz. EL Granada, CA Santa Clara. Yet, despite increases in fire activity, many forested areas in the West face a fire deficit Marlon et al. Recommendations boil down to the need for more ecologically beneficial fires and fewer fires with negative ecological or social impacts e.

In terms of federal fire management, there is broad recognition that the historical and ongoing emphasis on full suppression is problematic, leading to an unnatural accumulation of fuels, and that short-term fire suppression success creates a fire debt that eventually comes due Reinhardt et al.

Many fire-adapted ecosystems would benefit from low-moderate severity fire to maintain or restore ecological integrity North et al. However, under current management paradigms, US fire managers are unlikely to be able to maintain, much less increase, the acreage that is treated with fire prepared for fire Allen et al. Some argue that the Forest Service has poorly capitalized on opportunities to manage wildland fires for resource benefit, instead perpetuating a model of fire exclusion, which can lead to ever worsening feedbacks North et al.

Nonetheless, if the status-quo of suppressing almost all wildfires is maintained, management practices may do little to alleviate, and may exacerbate, fire problems. The extent of the problem in the United States is not lost on communities, land and fire managers, policy makers, or scientists. The scientific literature articulates the need to adapt to living with more fire, reduce exposure of responders and civilians, manage costs more effectively, increase restoration activities, and improve the ability to use fire as a management tool Reinhardt et al.

The research also indicates that communities in the West increasingly understand the importance of fire in the landscapes where they reside McCaffrey et al. Land managers in surveys also reflect an understanding of and commitment to these interrelated objectives Cleaves et al. And over time, as we discuss in subsequent sections of the paper, the US government has articulated the need for fire-adapted human communities, forest restoration, and improved approaches to suppression as exemplified through acts of Congress and numerous agency policies and actions WFEC In summary, there is broad agreement that current fire management practices are leading to undesirable outcomes and are unsustainable in the long run Olson et al.

It has become starkly apparent that recognizing that there is a problem is one thing, while solving it is entirely another. Reforming current fire management approaches will require work across social, economic, ecological, and organizational variables. Significant efforts need to occur on the social and economic pieces of the puzzle so that communities can become more fire adapted, and so that more forest restoration activities can take place where they are deemed appropriate.

More work is also needed so that fire responders can enhance the safety and effectiveness of fire management actions, including through capitalizing on opportunities to expand the footprint of fires to achieve long-term land and resource objectives Dunn et al. We recognize that the situation is not static and that different efforts are underway to address many of these issues e. Our goal in this paper is to look more closely at one key piece of the puzzle—the US Forest Service as a primary actor in this system and how agency policies and other structural institutions e.

Other scholars have noted that the Forest Service continues to prioritize short-term risks in its actions and have suggested potential areas of policy change Stephens et al. In this paper, we undertake an examination of existing policy and do not suggest changes to statutes or agency mission.

Instead, we focus on gaps in implementing current policy and how internal structures, policies, and guidance may be a force in that dynamic. Multiple authors have worked to describe the complexity of the wildfire problem, often characterizing fire management as a wicked problem, and one that is situated in dynamic and complex social-ecological systems Carroll et al. We examine this issue more narrowly, specifically in terms of how the primary wildland fire organization in the United States, the US Forest Service, defines the fire problem and how this may perpetuate current fire management approaches despite policy changes.

Problem definition plays an important role in both structuring decisions and framing solutions. In the decision sciences, problem definition or problem structuring is viewed as an essential first stage in a broader, multi-stage decision process, and one that can be particularly difficult for natural resource management problems Gregory et al.

The aim is to consider the multiple problems at hand and evaluate among them to direct resources to priorities. Ideally, actors work to ensure that priority problems are being addressed, the necessary people are involved, and the appropriate level and type of resources are brought to bear.

A well-framed problem statement and associated evaluation criteria ideally provide clarity that results in decisions that are more transparent, defensible, durable, and aligned with strategic objectives Marcot et al.

In the political science literature, problem definition or issue framing is often examined as a discursive strategy for advancing policy objectives in the policy process Pralle It involves multiple facets, including: how a problem is characterized e.

Competing or ambiguous definitions of a problem in policy result in goal ambiguity, which is something that characterizes almost all public agency mandates Pandey and Wright , Rainey and Jung Goal ambiguity comes in many forms, including ambiguity about how to translate broad mission statements into objectives and actions, prioritize among competing goals in policies, or measure progress towards stated goals Rainey and Jung For a governance challenge like fire, which is complex and involves many groups of constituents, eliminating goal ambiguity is not realistic, nor is it entirely desirable as ambiguous policies draw in broad constituencies and their political support Jarzabkowski et al.

Nonetheless, an important question for our purposes is what the consequences might be of goal ambiguity and how these may perpetuate the status quo in fire management within the US Forest Service. When faced with multiple, competing objectives, agencies will tend to focus on measurable accomplishments, particularly those that are relevant to leadership and political overseers like Congress on one- to two-year timelines Biber In addition, individual actors typically will operate within a bounded rationality, based on their professional training and how they and their colleagues understand problems Busenberg , Cairney et al.

Agencies also are apt to take on problems that can be handled by the organizational leadership, structure, and culture that already exists within an organization, often reverting to a status quo, even when policies may direct agencies to embrace change Allison The extent to which these dynamics will affect how policies are implemented depends on a wide array of factors, including the broader political context, local unit-level dynamics, and agency-wide variables Steelman In this paper, we consider the influence of agency-wide structural variables, including policy direction, performance measures, and decision-making requirements, on how Forest Service fire policy is implemented on the ground.

Policies we consider include: law written by Congress; regulations, which interpret the laws; and agency-specific policies in manuals or guidance. They serve multiple purposes, including incentivizing particular activities in the field and communicating agency accomplishments to stakeholders and Congress Radin Meeting targeted accomplishments for certain performance measures is important for positive personnel evaluations and maintenance or augmentation of budgets.

Performance measures can contribute to goal ambiguity when they emphasize competing objectives, are not clearly linked to stated goals, or when it is unclear how to prioritize among measures.

Although it is beyond the scope of this paper, it is worth noting that many other factors affect how policies are implemented, including a variety of unit-level variables, like local capacity, leadership, and stakeholders Steelman Additionally, informal norms sometimes referred to broadly as agency culture and communication from agency leadership at multiple levels can affect the likelihood that staff will adopt and support desired behaviors as policy changes Fernandez and Rainey The NFS manages the national forests and is responsible for resource distribution for land management, land and resource management planning i.

State and Private Forestry, in addition to engaging in landowner and state-level partnerships and assistance programs, houses the Fire and Aviation Management FAM program, which oversees fire prevention, pre-suppression preparedness, and suppression activities within the agency. Although many fire staff members are NFS employees, their funding, fire training, planning, and response operations typically follow FAM guidance and requirements.

Historically, FAM and NFS have shared responsibility for prioritizing investments in vegetation treatments to restore forest conditions and reduce hazardous fuel loads, although budget controls for these activities shifted primarily to NFS in fiscal year FY Because we seek to understand system-wide trends and not unit-level differences in policy implementation, we focus on structural variables in our analysis, including: congressional and agency policies, incentives in the form of performance measures, and agency-wide processes for decision making that are outlined in policy documents.

The most recent NFMA regulations, promulgated in 77 FR , explain how fire management is to be approached in forest plans.

The concept of ecological integrity, which incorporates aspects of resilience, natural range of variation, and biodiversity conservation, is the overarching framework of the planning rule Wurtzebach and Schultz Fire is thus described as both a driver i. Fire is presented in the planning rule primarily as an opportunity to restore ecological integrity but also as a potential risk to the same ecological integrity, at times threatening soil, water, and biodiversity conditions, as well as other valued resources and uses on national forests.

In addition, while plans are required to focus on ecological integrity, they are also supposed to contribute to social and economic sustainability. However, the planning rule does not indicate how these are to be prioritized if there are conflicts e. In recent decades, several other statutes have been passed that provide guidance on fire management.

The Act encourages the prioritization and implementation of fuels reduction treatments in areas at risk. The Act also focuses on community-level fire planning, something we discuss more below, specifically fuels reduction to remove proximate fire hazard.

In contrast to HFRA, which focused primarily on fuels reduction, CFLRP characterizes fire as both a risk to be managed and a natural process to be restored, with a focus on a larger-scale approach to addressing this problem. The sum total of these policies is a complex problem definition—one that requires fire be understood as a key ecological process to be restored, as well as a threat to natural resources, infrastructure, and communities that must be responded to. Some policies, like HFRA, emphasize fire primarily as a hazard, while more recent policies also identify fire as a natural ecological process.

Historically, the agency has used a handful of performance measures with hard targets for land management, including watersheds moved to an improved condition class, miles of road decommissioned, miles of stream habitat restored, volume of timber sold, and different types of acres treated, including wildland—urban interface WUI and non-WUI acres of fuels reduction.

In FY , the agency began focusing on two flagship targets, including fuels-acres treated and timber-volume sold. Fuels-acres treated can include acres treated with prescribed fire, natural ignitions managed for resource benefit, and mechanical thinning although whether acres treated as a result of wildfire can be counted depends on planning documents and varies at different levels of the agency.

The timber-volume-sold target can be compatible with fuels-acres treated, but it is often the hardest target to meet, incentivizing the agency to focus activities in places that will yield timber volume, even though these may not be priority areas for treatment for fire management Schultz et al.

Thus, performance measures emphasize both fuels reduction and timber production, two activities that may or may not be compatible, sending some mixed messages about priorities.

The Forest Service has sole land management decision-making authority on national forests. All decisions must be compliant with forest plans, which are developed through an interdisciplinary process and accompanied by environmental impact statements EIS , completed in accordance with requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act of NEPA; 42 USC et seq.

Any management actions to be implemented also go through project-level planning and additional NEPA processes, which can take years to complete. While decision making for federal land management agencies formally rests with the agency, the planning rule, HFRA, and CFLRP all emphasize the role of collaboration with diverse stakeholders in designing both forest plans and projects.

HFRA encourages creation of Community Wildfire Protection Plans, which at-risk communities at a minimum, the local fire department, local government, and state forestry agency develop in consultation with federal agencies, and which must include identification and prioritization of hazardous fuels reduction projects.

Under CFLRP, funding is allocated to a limited number of projects through a competitive process, and collaboration is required through all stages of project development, implementation, and monitoring Schultz et al. Given these requirements, major, planned land management actions take place after multiple years of deliberation, usually with input from organized stakeholder groups and broader public involvement, and time to conduct environmental impact analyses.

The exception is during wildland fire events, when decision making proceeds according to different norms, which we discuss more below. Although the evolution of federal fire policy over time is an interesting story in its own right, here we limit our discussion to a timeline that is relatively recent and that roughly corresponds to that articulated in the previous section.

In , in response to concern over the growing complexity and risks of managing wildland fire, the Secretaries of Agriculture and Interior chartered a Federal Wildland Fire Management Policy and Program Review to ensure consistency, cohesion, and cooperation across federal fire management agencies USDA and USDI Three of the areas emphasized in the document are: 1 the need to integrate wildland fire as an ecological process into land management planning; 2 the need to reintroduce fire into ecosystems and empower employees to do so; and 3 the need for agency administrators to have flexibility when making suppression response decisions.

Although structural fire protection in the WUI was explicitly stated to be outside of federal responsibility, and instead left to tribal, state, and local governments, the policy also emphasized the protection of human life and safety as the primary objective during wildland fire events, relative to property and resource values. Under this policy, managing a wildland fire for resource benefits required a formal prescription consistent with existing plans.

Five years later, in response to a challenging wildfire season, the Clinton Administration released a report titled Managing the Impact of Wildfires on Communities and the Environment often referred to as the National Fire Plan; Babbitt and Glickman In the National Fire Plan, there is limited recognition of fire as an ecological process and instead a clear focus on fire risk reduction with key recommendations for increasing firefighting resources e.

A review and update of the policy found that, although it was generally sound and appropriate, in practice, implementation of that policy had been lacking. The update acknowledged that the fire hazard in fire-adapted ecosystems and in the WUI was worse than previously understood and had continued to worsen due to fire exclusion practices NWCG Key themes included: 1 recognizing fire not only as a critical natural process but also as a tool to sustain healthy ecosystems; 2 improving the quality and relevance of fire management plans; 3 stressing that response to fire should be based not on the ignition source or location of the fire, but rather on the guidance and requirements outlined in fire management plans; and 4 establishing effective mechanisms to oversee and evaluate implementation of fire policy.

Concerns over insufficient implementation of policy remained, such that in , a document titled Guidance for Implementation of Federal Wildland Fire Management Policy was issued Fire Executive Council It again acknowledged that the issue of the WUI is more complex and extensive than previously considered, and closer coordination and engagement across federal, state, local, and tribal managers is needed.

One of the biggest shifts associated with the policy update is the clarification that a fire may be concurrently managed for one or more objectives, and that the full range of strategic and tactical options are available for response to every fire i. Previously, if any portion of a fire required suppression tactics, the entire fire needed to be managed with those tactics, and vice versa for a resource-benefit fire. In a shift from the language in the update that response should not be based on ignition source, the new guidance explicitly states that human-caused fires are to be suppressed in all instances without consideration of resource-benefit objectives.

The policy update thus somewhat expanded the decision space for fire managers by allowing the ability to manage the same naturally ignited fire for multiple objectives, along with the ability to change objectives over time as conditions evolve. In summary, Federal Wildland Fire Management Policy has evolved over the last 30 years in recognition of the increasing complexity of the wildland fire environment and the changing needs of the interagency fire management community.

Two prominent challenges—increasing number of values at risk in fire-prone areas and growing need to reintroduce fire into fire-adapted ecosystems—influenced policy updates and reflect management problems that the US Forest Service continues to face. Policy statements for decades have embraced a complex definition of the fire problem and provided direction to protect resources at risk and expand the presence of fire to meet resource objectives when possible.

Internal guidance documents build upon federal policy and collectively articulate fire program organizational policies, objectives, and principles, outline workforce roles and responsibilities, and define performance measures. This doctrine stresses aspects such as accountability, the need for clearly defined and attainable objectives, and integration of fire as a critical natural process.

The FSM thus describes the intent of wildfire response to be to achieve natural resource objectives in addition to protection objectives. Other sections of the FSM require local managers to assess and report area burned by wildfire that meets desired conditions as described in forest plans.

This provides a mechanism that accounts for the ecological role of fire in achieving beneficial outcomes, and allows managers to claim accomplishments from unplanned natural ignitions. Also relevant to our discussion are planning documents that help translate federal policy, agency guidance documents, and forest plans into action. Perhaps the most basic policy requirement is that every burnable acre of federally managed land needs to tie back to a fire management plan note that while this was long referred to as a Fire Management Plan [FMP], in , the agency began transitioning away from the Interagency Fire Management Plan [FMP] template towards Spatial Fire Planning [SFP].

These plans must be consistent with guidance from existing forest plans and are intended to inform and assist line officers NFS personnel with decision-making authority; i.

Outdated, inconsistent, or inflexible forest plans may constrain options Steelman and McCaffrey Current and proposed performance measures include the initial attack success rate, a landscape risk index, the percent of large fires that exceed a suppression cost threshold, and the percent of acres burned by unplanned natural ignitions with resource benefits USFS b.

This last measure in concept incentivizes ecologically beneficial fire and, as described earlier, is premised on an assessment of whether burned areas moved towards desired conditions. Two caveats are worth noting.

First, there may be ambiguity or incompatibility between this measure and initial attack targets, as increasing the initial attack success rate may foreclose opportunities to allow fire to resume its natural role in ecosystems.

Second, it does not appear that current reporting standards have any direct connection to fire response decisions and actions, such that, in theory, a manager could claim accomplishments even after deciding to aggressively suppress a fire to keep it as small as possible. However, three essential elements of success by this definition—reasonable objectives, firefighter exposure, and enhanced stakeholder support—do not appear in performance measures. Forest Service researchers have demonstrated how exposure-related performance measures could be developed, but there remains a need for better monitoring of suppression decisions and operations Stonesifer et al.

In addition, evaluating stakeholder support for management efforts would require more of an investment in social science research. The response to a wildfire unfolds within the National Incident Management System NIMS , which provides a consistent organizational framework to facilitate collaboration and coordination of wildfire response across agencies.

A key role is that of the Agency Administrator AA , who is the assigned line officer with statutory responsibility for managing the incident for National Forest lands, this can range from District Ranger to Regional Forester, depending on the fire size and complexity.

The AA is responsible for assigning and delegating responsibility for fire management operations to an incident commander IC for every fire. The assigned IC and accompanying Incident Management Team, or IMT is then accountable to the AA for achieving the desired strategic objectives through tactical and operational decisions, and handling all wildfire response activities, such as mobilizing and deploying suppression resources.

In many instances, the IC will be a local Forest Service employee with fire qualifications. In these cases, the objectives and guidance provided by the local AA to the IMT—made up of individuals who may be unfamiliar with local social and ecological conditions—are particularly important.

Here we return to the question of how the fire problem is defined and to what extent goal ambiguity exists when looking at the combination of policy, incentives, and decision-making structures within the US Forest Service. Both FAM and NFS policy acknowledge that fire is both a beneficial process and a threat to resources, life, and property.

However, there is limited recognition of how and when these two goals may conflict and how to handle the resultant tradeoffs. Examining the language in the different documents reveals two distinct problem definitions that use different wording. These represent significantly different problem framings in terms of how the problem and solutions are characterized. In addition, performance measures track different and sometimes competing objectives without clear priorities for accomplishments.

Our observation is that, rather than utilizing a complex definition of the fire problem, current agency policy effectively includes two competing definitions of the fire problem.

Thus, the problem as structured within the US Forest Service involves goal ambiguity in multiple ways, including how to reconcile these two conceptualizations of fire, prioritize among the risks associated with decision making in various aspects of fire management, and how to evaluate success, given that performance measures often track competing outcomes.

In addition, although both NFS and FAM embrace broad fire management objectives, when one digs a little deeper, significant differences between these two sides of the agency become more apparent. The performance measures for FAM emphasize more the fire-as-risk frame, with safety-related definitions of success and initial-attack measures, while those of NFS emphasize more the ecological process frame, with fuels-acres-treated targets.

Decision-making dynamics also are distinct when considered side by side Table 3. While the NEPA process does not ensure full disclosure of tradeoffs or guarantee quality analysis, it is a much more time intensive and deliberative process than the incident management system used by FAM to respond to fire, by which decisions are focused on operational response and resource needs, made in a matter of hours or days, and sometimes with little public involvement during or after decisions.

The two also operate under essentially separate management systems, including: largely separate budgets and relationships with budgetary limits i. Given the complexities and potential conflicts in how the fire management problem is defined within the Forest Service, it is critical to examine the factors that may drive prioritization among goals and perpetuate the status quo.

We suggest that treating the characterization of the fire management problem and attendant solutions as if it reflects a unified problem definition, without explicit recognition of the existing goal ambiguity and inherent conflicts in fire management within the agency, may be one reason improving fire outcomes has been elusive. In situations with goal ambiguity, agencies typically favor conducting work that is measurable on short timeframes and that they know how to do, based on their expertise Allison , Radin , Biber In addition, without targeted interventions, decision makers also tend to prioritize managing for short-term risk over long-term risk Underdal With fire, these tendencies can be exacerbated by temporal mismatches between the long-term dynamics of fuel accumulation, with short-term risks associated with fire events.

This dynamic is further enforced by short-term i. Individual decision makers likely will minimize short-term risks to their personal careers and liability, which increase as more fire is allowed onto the landscape, compared to risks to broader ecological conditions, which increase with fire suppression but are more likely to become apparent in the future, after the tenure of current decision makers. Biases towards management for short-term risks also are likely to dominate during wildland fire events, which are often viewed as emergency situations requiring rapid decision making, with immediate risks readily apparent Stephens et al.

Because agency administrators are the face of the NFS to their local publics and to political overseers, they also may face considerable pressure to put out a fire depending on the perceived risk to communities and potential smoke impacts.

For these reasons, without clear incentives or processes to do otherwise, we can assume that managers are likely to consistently prioritize managing for short-term risks over long-term risks, resulting in a consistent emphasis on fire suppression, even though policy articulates a broader set of goals Donovan and Brown , Wilson et al. In light of the complexity of policy goals, another important question is whether decision makers and planners are armed with the appropriate training and experience to manage the complex risk management and strategic planning tasks that are required in planning for and responding to fire.

Although risk management is increasingly acknowledged as a desired core competency for both NFS and FAM personnel, there remains an absence of guidance in policies for how managers ought to balance often competing objectives, or how managers ought to be assessing and discussing complex tradeoffs. The one piece of policy that indirectly addresses tradeoffs simply gives incident commanders the authority to supersede natural, environmental, and cultural resource objectives when potentially life-threatening situations exist, in effect weighting the decision focus toward emergency response USFS a.

This further increases the likelihood that incident commanders will pursue courses of action that minimize perceived short-term risks, while failing to achieve resource objectives and potentially exacerbating long-term risks to landscapes, communities, and future responders. If the fire problem must be understood as a complex one that requires situational risk management, then personnel and processes must be primed to accomplish this task with attendant guidance, training, and experience.

Although goal ambiguity is an inherent part of an organization with a multiple-use mandate, as is the need for different internal staffs specialized in various tasks, the degree of difference and division between FAM and NFS increases the challenge of navigating goal ambiguity across the entire agency in a deliberative and coherent fashion.

As we have noted, FAM policies, decision-making processes, and performance measures emphasize suppression to a greater extent than NFS processes. Both decision-making processes and performance measures prime FAM to emphasize short-term risk management to a greater extent than NFS, which has numerous processes in place to engage in long-term planning. Personnel within FAM are much more likely to have a background in fire suppression than other agency staffs; conversely, as fire training requirements have increased, the number of NFS personnel with fire experience has decreased.

These dynamics limit the ability of personnel in the different branches to recognize and understand the tradeoffs among different goals.

Without intentional work to better share perspectives, experience, and knowledge across these two sides of the agency, there is a likelihood that, despite policy changes, suppression will continue to be emphasized, particularly by FAM, and that the two staffs within the Forest Service may work towards divergent goals and talk past each other.

In summary, the current system likely will continue to lead to prioritization of management for short-term risks during wildland fire events. The agency for most of its history has focused on fire suppression and acquiring the human and capital resources necessary to fight fire, making it likely that, as an organization, the Forest Service still is better primed for suppression than management of natural fire Busenberg Divisions between NFS and FAM branches within the agency may exacerbate this dynamic during wildland fire events, even if NFS continues to emphasize long-term planning goals for ecological restoration in its planning documents.

Without adequate training and strong incentives to counter natural biases in both branches, personnel are likely to revert to default behaviors, focusing on what they know how to do best, minimizing short-term risks, and maximizing measurable accomplishments over politically and professionally relevant timelines.

While some specialization within the Forest Service of its wildland fire and land management branches may be necessary, better connections and communication between the two sides of the agency could improve the ability to more effectively navigate goal ambiguity. In addition, improved integration of planning exercises and more clarity on how to prioritize among goals may be in order.

In this section, we offer our suggestions for paths forward, constraining our recommendations to actions that could be undertaken within the current legal framework and organizational structure of the Forest Service. As noted earlier, eliminating goal ambiguity is not desirable or feasible for Forest Service land and fire management. This presents an area of opportunity for improved internal dialogue with the agency, as a starting point, perhaps towards defining fire management as a complex risk management problem.

In addition, developing a meta-frame requires dialogue among multiple constituencies. For fire management, this kind of stakeholder dialogue is important because of the emphasis on collaboration in policy, the role of local partners and stakeholders in preparing and responding to fire, and because local collaborative contexts will have a significant impact on implementation of ambiguous policy goals Matland Working with stakeholders e.

External partners also can offer a degree of accountability to long-term goals and bring support for those goals to fire events, potentially alleviating some of the political pressure and natural decision biases that lead to a relatively greater emphasis on managing for short-term risks in the face of goal ambiguity.

Long-term collaboration and larger-scale planning under approaches like CFLRP and other Forest Service restoration approaches likely support meta-framing and a possible a path forward Schultz et al.

Another step the agency could take to support the long-term goals of reintroducing more fire into forested ecosystems and minimize the risks associated with not doing so, would be to decrease barriers to engaging in strategic and transparent fire management planning, which would allow for more upfront consideration of various tradeoffs.

In particular, long-term versus short-term considerations can be undertaken deliberatively and over time, outside the context of emergency management. We also support the notion of developing plans that are spatially and temporally scalable, and that are designed to be flexible and adaptive Meyer et al. A related opportunity lies in better integrating fire management planning into forest and project-level planning so that tradeoffs can be evaluated at the plan stage and built into project-level planning more effectively.

During the planning process, identification could be made of areas where fire might be managed on the land to meet different management objectives, where it would likely need to be suppressed, and where to prioritize fuels treatment see Thompson et al. Some of this has happened in the past but often outside of the NEPA process, limiting opportunities for transparency, deliberation, and stakeholder involvement.

In essence, we suggest that incorporating conversations about fire management more regularly into formal decision-making processes could lay valuable groundwork for both forest and project planning, while engaging all participants in creating necessary meta-frames for fire management.

Ideally, pre-season discussions about potential strategies and tradeoffs with different resource personnel or other agency partners could expand the decision space during fire events. Such activities could be used as a means of setting expectations for response for both an IMT as well as the community, with the goal of ensuring that effective plans for fire management are in place that can support more burning and have stakeholder support.

Over time, this may create more pressure to justify suppression decisions when they compromise long-term management goals. Importantly, these activities require that the agency has adequate capacity, so that personnel trained in both fire management and fire ecology can participate in planning processes and have the time and skills to effectively engage in collaboration with partners and stakeholders.

Another opportunity to improve decision making is to build greater accountability into the incident command process, which has been a historically difficult area for the public to gain any oversight or involvement. Accountability is central to successful public administration and can augment understanding of where current practices are contributing to the status quo Kettl Organizations with activities subject to direct observation also are better at evaluating progress towards goals Lee et al.

One core area would be evaluating the quality of line officer and incident commander decisions on large fire incidents Thompson et al. We recognize that line officers and incident commanders may see greater accountability measures as potentially taking time away from more important activities or second-guessing their expertise in what are high-pressure situations.

However, the time is ripe to explore opportunities to introduce greater accountability procedures formally, particularly given the current emphasis from Congress on cost accountability. For example, tracking variation in suppression resource use and identifying high-use IMTs could support greater accountability around cost containment and firefighter exposure Hand et al. An important aspect of this would be to evaluate patterns of behavior over time, as opposed to confining evaluation to isolated fire assignments or even fire seasons.

To what extent and by what avenues the agency might welcome greater external review of its practices is beyond the scope of this paper, but it is a critical question for discussion.

Finally, we segue from accountability to the related problem of performance measurement and how this may be influencing decision making in the face of goal ambiguity. Ongoing evaluation of performance measures is always essential to ensure that they are incentivizing the desired mix of activities and meeting communication needs Radin One area for which better measures may be needed is in tracking the ecological outcomes associated with restoration activities, including the reintroduction of fire.

In the face of goal ambiguity, because decision makers will favor measurable outcomes, it is important to consider how to better measure ecological outcomes, both to create strong incentives to manage fire for long-term ecological benefits and to effectively communicate success to policy makers. One opportunity may be to keep acres-treated targets, but to also develop one-, five-, and ten-year goals for priority watersheds, communities, or ecosystems at risk. Short-term measures could be aggregated into more complex multi-year measures to communicate success over time.

Another possibility for enhanced performance measurement would be to move away from strictly outcome-based reporting of beneficial burned acres i. The goal would be to provide clearer incentives during incidents to manage natural fires for something other than suppression, in areas where forest plans or project decisions allow for fire. Such a shift could require, for instance, the agency to more clearly articulate how much effort put into preventing an acre from burning is tolerable for that same acre, if it does ultimately burn, to be claimed as an accomplishment.

In the ideal, such systemic changes could better align objectives, strategy, and performance by evaluating outcomes in relation to how management decisions and actions influenced attainment of land management objectives Thompson et al.

A final issue, particularly for FAM, is to provide more dialogue about the import of different performance measures and how to prioritize among them. At present, priorities are unclear and different measures provide conflicting incentives. Further, some aspects of success, as defined by the agency, have no clear, associated measures, making it likely that these activities are under-incentivized, and also making it likely that the agency might miss opportunities for organizational learning and improvement.

Ambiguity and complexity in Forest Service fire policy, which recognizes fire as both an ecological process and a risk to human values, cannot be entirely eliminated, nor would that necessarily be appropriate. However, it is important to overtly recognize different problem definitions, the extent of current goal ambiguity, and the resultant potential conflicts that exist within and between NFS and FAM. This is a necessary step to begin to identify approaches that could improve upon a status quo that continues to prioritize fire suppression, despite multiple policy changes intended to decrease that emphasis.

Creating a meta-frame of the fire management problem that is developed by diverse stakeholders and across parts of the agency could more explicitly recognize the conflict between fire as risk and fire as ecological process and enable more nuanced questions to be asked, such as how to best support more fire on the landscape.

Collaborative partners are critical to supporting increased application of fire and could ease some of the pressure on fire managers during wildland and prescribed fire events.

Partners can help to communicate the importance of the long-term risks of fire exclusion and hold managers accountable to locally agreed upon strategies to manage for more fire.

Integrating fire management more directly into the forest management planning process also could serve to decrease the distance between the long-term time horizon of forest planning and the near-term time horizon of fire response.

Improving the design of performance measures, with some that communicate multi-year successes, and embracing more comprehensive training in complex decision making around tradeoffs also may offer some paths forward.